The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  And where is Elizabeth, my Lil, the prettiest of jewels in my crown? Off playing amid her beauty, casting her pearls among boys. Look at her, dancing along to somebody’s tinny record player on the top deck, pretending not to notice the boys. Look at her, the artist, the poet, the one whose eye is already bent upon the poem. Use the poem, Lil, don’t use your beauty, please use the words of the poem.

  Sydney

  As the ship came through the Heads I saw the arc of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and yellow and green ferries on their way to Manly. I had to sit down in fear that I was going to faint. Anna looked at me anxiously; for her sake I smiled.

  ‘Home,’ I said.

  There was a small posse of cameras and journalists to meet us. I saw David standing in the crowd on the dock long before he saw me; he was wearing a new suit which looked too big on him, his face anxiously knotted. When I saw his face again I understood all over again that I loved him. We have fought too long, side by side, to surrender now.

  Ros’s house—first impressions

  So this is Ros, in situ, Australia’s first female tenured professor of English relaxing at home. These are the gum trees, the lawns, the big houses; this is the rumoured land of plenty. The supermarkets, the washing machines, the televisions, modern life: like Sleeping Beauty I have awakened. Everything is so easy, everything you could ever need is so close at hand. First impressions: the Australian accent, how it grates on the ears. Everybody strikes me as loud, rowdy and uncouth, sloppy in speech and manners. I hear myself speaking and I sound like the Queen, all received pronunciation and rounded vowels. Even Ros’s voice sounds harsh, I have never heard anyone say the word ‘fuck’ so many times in so few sentences. When did everyone start saying ‘fuck’ all the time? Ros seems like a woman perilously close to being too much like a man—Australian women have a kind of brusqueness about them, some knock-it-off quality, as if somehow lacking in gentleness. Certainly my dear Ros has it in abundance, a pull-your-socks-up manner, gruff, not comfortable with too much emotion. When we met for the first time in fourteen years, the first thing she said to me after giving me a cursory hug was, ‘Our car’s got a flat. We’ll have to catch a taxi,’ before hauling several suitcases up under her strong arm and marching off.

  And poor Ros is cursed with me. A sister whose eyes are a vale of tears, whose heart at any minute threatens to burst its banks. How frail and old our mother looks sitting in one of Ros’s ghastly new modern chairs, how bent her arthritic back, how unreliable her memories. I had to flee the room when I took her hand in my own and felt the flimsiness of her bones. I tried to speak but could not: I sat holding her hand for as long as I could before rushing from the room.

  In Ros’s green tiled bathroom I cried for everything. No father! How great the gaping hole in my mind’s map of Australia—my father once took up the whole map, straddling the country. Without him everything seems unnaturally quiet: no harassing, booming voice, no immense figure to block out the light. I remember copying in my journal a letter Kafka once wrote: Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. I cannot seem to keep anything in my mind: this new world presses too heavily upon me.

  When I composed myself I went back into the lounge room and drew up a chair close to my mother.

  ‘Do you still see anyone from Kurrajong Bay, Mum?’ I asked softly (she has been in a nursing home around the corner from Ros since May).

  ‘Kurrajong Bay? Oh, yes, I went there for a holiday once with Arthur. We went first class all the way.’

  She has forgotten everything. She has no memory of that wooden house with the verandah covered by great arcs of jasmine, of the scrubby buffalo grass in that backyard with no fence, that garden which ran down all the way to the sand dunes. I wondered if she even remembered who I was. Did the long pile of days that we lived apart cause her to forget me? Should I have stayed to share the hours with her so that our lives would have remained bound by the commonality of shopping and dinners and slow Sunday afternoons, by the circumstantial captivity that tethers most lives? It occurred to me that in freeing myself I sidestepped my obligations, turning myself into the kind of daughter a mother might fail to recognise. It is too late now to reclaim those lost hours, and for this my heart feels drowned.

  And Ros looks so like our father. Who would have thought that she would carry him on—his hands, the cut of his jaw, the set of his shoulders. I cannot look. I am forever rushing from rooms, an endless flood spilling from my eyes.

  Later

  My noisy, foul-mouthed countrymen and women—Ros’s husband Peter must be the foulest-mouthed man I have ever met. He is an academic too—like Ros, never wanted children—and when both of them are sitting on the back patio drinking beers and smoking their heads off—the girls drinking weak shandies with us—it is all I can do to stop myself rushing up to Anna and Lil to block their ears. The girls continually talk to each other in Greek, a private code. They have already made friends with the teenage boy next door though—the vogue is for ‘pool parties’ and they have already been invited twice. The smell of Ros’s Sydney backyard on a summer night—newly mown grass being watered, the buzz of cicadas; somewhere, the burned meat and onions of a barbeque. In the mornings I wake before dawn and creep out to turn my head up to the transcendent arch of the Southern Hemisphere’s great sky, imagining the Greek sky beginning to darken.

  I cannot sleep, I cannot sleep; everything is awake inside me, every dream, every thought, every fear. My head is crowded with the past, with people long dead or long gone. In the streets of Sydney I am forever peering into faces, looking for something, or someone. I am exhausted by everything. I cannot stop my mind from wheeling endlessly on its own anxieties, my heart is endlessly knocking in my chest as though I have had a terrible fright. Whatever happened to Beryl? To Ray? To that boy in Kurrajong Bay whose name I no longer recall who once kissed me?

  Do our bodies remember everything? Do our eyes recall every once-loved face which passed before them? I cannot for the life of me remember the particulars of Beryl’s face, I cannot remember the girl I was in that long-ago wallpapered room. I have forgotten so much, so many people! I have forgotten who I was. When I recall myself at nineteen, at twenty-two, I am recalling another person entirely, a kind of relative of myself, but no longer myself. All those dead selves piled up inside me, all the girls I used to be—how can I stop the dread that visits me at night, the fullest knowledge of the weight of my mistakes, the nameless anxiety that something awful awaits me. David is growing frustrated with me, forever asking how I am feeling. ‘You’ve got that look again, Kate.’ Success seems to have momentarily quelled his bitterness towards me but he is fast losing his patience (it is only when he is drunk that I glimpse again that closed-in, hunched look he gets when he is about to turn nasty). I cannot seem to help myself, I cannot compose my own face. I cannot stop fading out from wherever I am meant to be, from privately travelling far away. I am looking everywhere but upon the present moment, I am imagining everything but the shape of the future. How can I steady myself upon the earth so that I might safely push the girls out into life’s waters? I am so frightened—surely I have not lost my faith in the value of survival, surely I have not travelled all this way only to lose that?

  Sunday

  The quality of Australian light, somehow harsher than Greece; the self satisfied nature of everyone—‘Greece is beautiful but I bet it’s not a patch on Australia,’ said the man who stamped my passport at the dock. ‘Welcome home.’ What is it about Australia that already defeats me? The fact that there doesn’t seem to be anything to struggle against? That meat and beer and neat lawns and full employment are laid out on the table and one need only reach out the laziest of hands? The strug
gle is over! The struggle to live a life singular and beautiful, away from Australia’s sad suburban rectitudes, away from this brawny place that has no use for poets. Even our rocky island needed its poets, its stories and myths, even our former rocky home knew the purpose of a line from Aesop.

  Everything is so familiar, and yet strange. The smell of the place, the light, the faces of the people—known, known, known. Yet many things are different—more Europeans, more European writing on shop signs, the ability to buy freshly roasted coffee beans. But still—ladies lounges in the pubs, bars where women cannot go—but at least the pubs close at ten now. I remember men at Kurrajong Bay in the pub after work guzzling as much beer as possible before six o’clock closing—at the very hour when people all over Europe were just beginning to dress for a pre-dinner drink.

  Pat came up from Melbourne to see us—she’s now a big shot in the theatrical world. She brought her husband George who runs an art gallery, a Frenchman who arrived after the war. Although we’d never met he soon seemed as familiar as Pat, who hasn’t changed one bit—after a few seconds of awkwardness between us Atpay and I resumed our lifelong conversation as if my years away had never been and I had momentarily been gone from the room.

  Pat and George are the most vivid people we have met so far—they said we would notice all sorts of differences since we had left, that the social and cultural climate of Australia was changing fast but they found themselves nonetheless mixing in a smallish circle of like-minded friends.

  ‘Quite a lot of Australians still reach for their guns when they hear the word “culture”,’ George said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pat, ‘they still suspect you’re a wanker, or a poof.’ We laughed but I felt a sense of foreboding.

  A general sense here that everybody is sleepwalking through their lives. Our island was hardly a bustling metropolis but everyone did their job with a particular kind of attentiveness, whether it was threading weave into the backs of wooden chairs or scraping up donkey shit. Even the men drinking ouzo or canned retsina sitting apparently idle around a table in Pan’s taverna were doing a kind of job—sharing information, gathering news, living inseparably from every other man and woman around them. Life was a repetitive organic system, closely bound with the earth’s seasons and the rituals of the Church.

  Am I romanticising my past already? Is it too early to say that I fear my life in Australia will be dry and passionless, that I fear everything good, every sense of the possible, is now behind me? ‘Don’t look back, Kate,’ David said to me this morning, ‘you’ll turn into a pillar of salt.’

  A letter in Jerry’s distinctive curly hand arrived this morning. I threw it unopened into the rubbish bin. What use to me is the past?

  Monday

  I’ve been offered a job. The editor of the Herald called to ask whether I would be interested in ‘a little column’. I met him at a publishing party for David’s book—quite a nice, civilised chap I thought—and he telephoned yesterday to say he had thought of me over the weekend and wondered if I would care to write something ‘literary’ for the Herald. He had in mind something like a fortnightly essay, in which I was free to write whatever I liked. Be witty. Controversial. Political. Anything I like.

  A few ripe words then, succulent with meaning. A column, no less than 1000 words, a nice fat regular cheque. David, of course, being happy himself, was full of happiness for me. ‘It can only be a good thing, Kate, an excellent way of keeping your name about. Thousands of people read newspapers—only a handful read novels or poems. It’ll make your name. You’ll be more famous than me!’

  What happens to names which fall beyond the public’s line of sight? Is a poet still a poet if her poem remains unread?

  I have striven all these years to reach the nameless poem. It appears I have been travelling fruitlessly in a circle.

  Journalism will put food in our mouths, my name back on the table; journalism was the place I began and it appears to be the place where I will end.

  Why is it that I see this opportunity only as my failure?

  I will write the column. But I will mourn the nameless poem.

  Sydney, 1969

  Can’t do anything any more. Feel very frightened.

  Can’t feel love. Trying to hold on for the girls. Finishing this.

  Sydney, 1946

  May 15

  Knuckle, lip, ankle, flesh:

  If I were a man I’d be him.

  Our kin of bones

  Our seamless skin:

  Body of my body

  Flesh of my flesh.

  Our bony harmony, our common tears:

  A single tongue, unleashed.

  His orgasm—soft and unfrozen—the sweetest, most silent orgasm I have ever known, a gentle sigh; if you breathed too loudly you’d miss it. As though everything has stopped: time, the movement of the earth, everything but the gentle throb in my dark centre. I am lost in the smell of him, the sugared oiliness of his skin, the surprising plump softness of his mouth.

  Thank you, God, for the feel of my bare feet on the cold lino, for the balance of construction, the way my body of nerves and blood is held up. Thank you for the wonder of movement, for the settling of my shoulders, the swing of my arms, the bliss of animated life. Thank you for the breath of in and out, the hidden bloom of lung. Thank you for the sight of sky, of sun; for the sight of his wounded face.

  Sydney, 1951

  We are sailing out through the heads of Sydney Harbour. I am alone here with my journal on the upper deck—David has taken the girls back to the cabin.

  You should have seen the look on Dad’s face as we were leaving—he was trying so hard to look nonchalant. Mum was hysterical, waving frantically, alternatively clutching and sobbing into her handkerchief like some mother in a bad movie. Dad refused even to wave: he was all dressed up, in his best suit and hat, his face completely impassive. I wonder when I will see them again.

  ‘Goodbye, Katherine,’ Dad said, kissing me stiffly on the cheek before we boarded the ramp. ‘I hope London bequeaths you melodious days. Remember, “Life is just a stuff to try the soul’s strength on”.’

  Is this Shakespeare? Tennyson? Davey will know—he knows everything—every poem, Latin, the workings of love.

  I’m ready for life. I can’t wait for it to try its hardest upon me, to try to force me once again to my knees. My soul feels like it has the strength of a thousand armies.

  Am I not still standing? My arms full?

  I feel equal to the bluest of peninsulas.

  I plan on sitting in the opera house at Covent Garden, on plunking myself down at one of those famous tables in the reading room of the British Museum, on listening to the BBC till my ears break. I plan on drinking a cocktail at the Savoy, of turning up my eyes to the glory of St Paul’s. I am going to take the girls to the Victoria and Albert and to concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. I am going to map the particulars of one small existence, write a testament to all the coming hours.

  I am going to fill this book, and fill it and fill it with all the wonders I am about to see. I am going to write poems, stories, novels, the words of my children: I am going to write the story of my life.

  What a gift life is, what a strange and terrible responsibility it is to live.

  Let me be equal to it, let me feel its ecstasies and terrors.

  Let me give everything it is within my soul to give, plunge headlong into the fullest rush of life.

  Let life begin!

  Part Two:

  Anna

  Canberra, 2003

  I’ve been coming to the library every day for a month now. Being anal retentive I like to sit at the same desk. Preferably in the same chair. I get here early so that I can make sure I get my table. Only once someone else was sitting at it. I gave him my frostiest look.

  Lately I have become worried that I am starting to forget my mother. I am beginning to forget how she looked the last time I saw her. I can’t remember her last words to me. I think we discussed s
omething banal like a new boyfriend or the results of an exam, I don’t know, I no longer remember.

  I am older than she will ever be. I have lived longer without her than with her.

  I don’t know what I expected in coming here. A means of reviving my fading memory perhaps. An explanation probably. One day I just decided to come. Since I live in Sydney, it took some arranging. My partner was helpful, my sons as understanding as teenage boys can be.

  My desire to come no doubt has something to do with the fact that my eldest boy is preparing to leave home. I have always regarded myself as a practical woman. Not the type to succumb to extravagant emotion. Overly controlled is the usual complaint.

  But lately I have begun to feel sad. I have been feeling that my life is coming to an end. My father died last year. The university has offered me early retirement. I have been thinking a lot about my mother.

  A couple of days after my mother’s death I could still smell her in her bedroom. In her sheets, her clothes. There was hair in her scabby old hairbrush. Everything she ever said to me was crystal clear. Now it is not so clear.

  My father couldn’t go near her room. When we were sorting through her things he stood in the doorway. He wouldn’t come in.

  He was the one who found her. He couldn’t wake her up. It was only when he shook her and felt how cold she was that he realised she was dead. He saw the bottle of pills and the whisky on the bedside table. Then he saw the note.